Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to chat room management and more particularly to chat room event handling in a host chat room environment.
Description of the Related Art
A chat room refers to on-line, synchronous conferencing over a computer communications network. A chat room most commonly takes the form of a real-time interactive messaging session between a multiplicity of individuals sharing a common bounded view. The common bounded view most often is managed centrally by a chat server that processes inbound messages received from different participants to a chat session and presents those messages in the common bounded view for all of the participants to see. The modern chat room serves the primary purpose of sharing share information by way of text messages with a group of other users. Generally speaking, the ability to converse with multiple people in the same conversation differentiates chat rooms from instant messaging programs, which are more typically designed for person-to-person communication.
Chat rooms have been incorporated into wider scale computing environments that range from social networks to enterprise conferencing. Chat rooms oftentimes are topical in nature and, as such, end users in a particular chat room are generally connected via a shared interest or other similar connection. Chat rooms service a wide range of subjects, from the sublime to the risqué.
Recent advances in chat room technology incorporate more than mere textual exchanges. To wit, shared video feeds are provided, as are file transfer capabilities. Composite chat sessions integrate text with audio and video exchanges as well as file exchanges. The incorporation of such composite media finds particular application in socially topical chat session technologies. However, the utilization of composite media in a chat session is resource intensive and not accessible by the ordinary individual seeking to provide a topical chat room to a set of end users. Consequently, chat hosting services have emerged to provide a computing platform upon which individual subscribers may deploy individual chat rooms, each chat room being managed separately from other chat rooms, each chat room subsisting in isolation from other chat rooms.
Conventional chat room hosting provides a limited interface through which a subscriber can deploy a themed chat room including a video feed typically originating at a subscriber computer. More advanced chat hosting facilities permit the subscriber to moderate postings to a managed chat room. However, to fully provide a distinctive chat room experience, chat room subscribers providing a chat room in a hosted environment prefer to support a customized environment with customized chat room logic. To do so, however, requires the hosting environment to expose the underlying computing infrastructure to the programmatic flaws of the customized chat room logic. Further, to do so provides for a security exposure.